So one is never factually foolish? If someone selling drugs who has been robbed goes to the police who promptly arrests her for illegal dealing, this not foolish? If a drunk driver stops and asks a policeman for directions, only to be arrested for drunk driving, it is not foolish? Certainly one can say that anything that carries with it a subjective value judgment cannot be evaluated in the eyes of the law. Yet this would seem to place an awful limitation on the evaluative capabilities of the law.
Well that depends on your criteria for choosing a good reason. One might say that since any criteria might be theoretically chosen, the law should never attach any meaning to the concept of outrageousness. Yet this, it seems, would defeat the purpose of a great body of criminal law to begin with. For criminal law is, at its root, founded in great part of the notion of right or wrong, a notion that is itself, by those standards, inherently subjective.
Take the notion of 'murder'. If one is to say that murder is the intentional taking of a human life by another, then various things which society condones- war, abortion, capital punishment, the end of life support- all could arguably be called murder, and there are significant segments of society which make claims of all of these. The notion of what is and is not murder is then subjective. One can say as a matter of fact that person X was or was not intentionally involved in the chain of casuality that led to the death of person Y, but one cannot say as a statement of fact that X 'murdered' Y. Yet the law deals with murder. So why can the law not deal with outrageousness?
